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What few people know about my dad:
He was a nationally syndicated cartoonist.

Born in Montréal, 1923.
Moved to Brooklyn.
Did a stint as a toy designer.
Then picked up a pen and never put it down.

His work ran in
The Saturday Evening Post.
Collier's. The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The New Yorker.

He used multiple pen names:
Sam Brier. S.B. Stevens. Ken Stevens.

He had more identities than
Baskin-Robbins has flavors.

His career:
1945 to 1956. Eleven years.

A few years later, I showed up.

Some of us celebrate dads for showing up.

Showing up is the baseline.

Some dads made us laugh.

Others taught us to see the world with wonder.

My dad made jokes for a living. Cartoons.

Single-panel windows into a world where children were, in his words, "the best comedians since the silent movies."

He understood something most people miss: the best humor doesn't announce itself. It waits.

As I grew, I realized these different levels of living, working, and playing. The practitioner, the professional, and the genius of life, and of fatherhood.

Here's what I mean.

The practitioner dad gets the burger to the table. He's there. And there is not nothing. Presence beats absence every time, and in a world where too many kids grow up with an empty chair, showing up is already a victory. But it's the beginning, not the destination.

The professional dad plates it beautifully. Right advice. Right lessons. Right boxes checked. He gets the Hallmark card. He earned it. But correct is not memorable. A technically perfect cartoon nobody laughs at is a failure. A father who never surprises you is a checklist with a pulse.

The genius dad adds an ingredient you never saw coming. And you remember it for the rest of your life.

My father's ingredient was surprise.

He never gave me career advice.
He never sat me down and said
"David, here's how you build a brand."

He drew. He observed. He found the
invisible thing and put a frame around it.

Five things I learned from him, whether he meant to teach me or not:

• Show up before you're asked. He was at the drawing board every day. Not because someone was waiting. Because creators create. Fathers who make things — art, meals, traditions, trouble — understand that presence isn't passive. It's generative.
• Make it memorable, not just correct. His cartoons had a point of view. They weren't safe. They weren't focus-grouped. They were alive. Be the dad whose kids remember the thing you did wrong that turned into the story they tell at Thanksgiving.
• Add the ingredient nobody saw coming. The pen names. Plural. My father was juggling identities before A/B testing existed. Different voices, different publications, same truth. He was a brand architect in an era when nobody used those words. He taught me that without ever saying a syllable about branding.
• Let them know you knew. His line about children playing house wasn't a joke. It was observation sharpened into a blade. The best fathers don't just do the thing. They name it. They prove they were paying attention when you thought nobody was watching.

Repeat until it's who you are, not merely what you do. Eleven years. Not a lifetime.

But the man who drew those cartoons and the man who raised me were the same man.

He didn't perform creativity. He was creative.

He didn't manufacture warmth. He was warm.

You can't fake the ingredient.
You bake it in or you don't.

The greatest lesson was questioning everything to elevate anything ordinary to the extraordinary.

I've spent forty years helping founders, owners, and entrepreneurs of all types escape the wall of beige. Teaching that different beats better. That the ingredient nobody saw coming is the only thing anyone remembers.

I learned it from a cartoonist in Brooklyn who used three different names, drew eleven years of quiet genius, and never once sat me down to explain what he was doing.

He didn't tell me how to stand out. He showed me what standing out looks like when you're not even trying.

That's the ingredient.

Happy Father's Day.
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